HeyJaredGrowing Middle Minds
Growing Middle Minds is a record of instructional decisions designed to stretch adolescent thinking. I document the slow, deliberate work of teaching middle school—where cognitive growth, visible thinking, and thoughtful design intersect.
- Indexed issues, all indexed history
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest indexed
- Jan 11, 2026
Latest issues
Graphic Novels, Close Reading and Making Thinking Visible. (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="357.27197802197804" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Fwxh!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F829b3361-c4be-4918-b735-6c3d94248…
Alternative Assessments does not mean losing rigor. (opens the original)
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When people hear “alternative assessment,” they sometimes picture an easier assignment: make a poster, record a video, create something colorful instead of writing an essay.That is not what I mean. In our dystopian literature unit, students had choices in how they showed their learning. Some of their choices include create a visual essay, design a collage, develop a graphic narrative, produce an op-ed, blackout poetry or a podcast. The final products looked very different, but the expectations a…
Architect Mode - Part 2 (opens the original)
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Earlier this year, I discovered, while tinkering away on various LLMs that you can, in fact, make your own little apps, easily. I wrote about this process in my last post, Architect Mode and I’ve finally got round to working on the how-to manual. You can download it here: Architect Mode Manual.
Architect Mode (opens the original)
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I consider myself fairly tech-savvy. I always have been, and my students usually are too. But for most of the last year, I’ve been quietly resistant to putting AI in front of them. Lately, the more I watch eighth graders work, the more I see a pattern that predates ChatGPT but has been supercharged by it: the pull toward finishing faster, toward smoother text, toward the right answer delivered rather than built.So when AI arrived in classrooms promising personalized support and instant feedback,…
Teaching Students to Question What They Read (Before They Can Question Everything) (opens the original)
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Most of my eighth graders have never been taught to question what they’re reading. In my ELA classroom, I watch this play out daily — students who accept what they read at face value, or who’ve learned to slap the word “biased” on anything they disagree with and move on. There’s rarely a middle ground. They don’t yet have the tools to be critical without being cynical, to question a source without dismissing it entirely.This is the problem I was trying to solve when I built my Critical Reading i…
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